1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a method of mass-producing high-purity nucleotides at a high speed.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In practice, the major obstacles to developing the field of synthetic biology are high price and low purity of DNA, which is a basic material for research of synthetic biology. Over the past decade, while the price of DNA has stayed at 1 dollar per base, the purity of a DNA sequence synthesized with a relatively long length has drastically fallen such that there are economic, temporal and mathematical limits to assembling bases to have a significant sequence length and applying the DNA sequence. For example, a microarray method for synthesizing DNA using an inkjet or light irradiation technique can synthesize at least several millions of kinds of independent DNA through a single synthesis process, thereby dramatically reducing the price of DNA. However, the purity of the synthesized DNA is lower than that of the conventional chemically synthesized sequence, and it is difficult to physically separate the synthesized DNAs for post-processing based on the kind of DNA sequence, due to the characteristic of an extraction technique. Recently, to solve these problems, Matzas, M., et al. suggested a technique of analyzing millions of DNA synthesized by microarray using a next generation DNA sequencer, picking microbeads having only one kind of DNA by a pick-and-place method, and repairing and amplifying the DNA [Matzas, M., et al. High-Fidelity Gene Synthesis by Retrieval of Sequence-Verified DNA Identified Using High-Throughput Pyrosequencing. Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 1291-1294 (2010)]. However, this paper only proves the concept, and therefore it is difficult to apply to genome-level research handling a large quantity of DNA because it takes much time, for example, at least several tens of minutes, to practically pick beads. In addition, this thesis does not suggest a general technique of tracing an exact location of a microbead to extract. Moreover, the pick-and-place method has a basic problem of cross-contamination.